Soil and Water Blog

Wednesday, 13 December 2017

I’m delighted to share the news that my latest PhD student (co-supervised with Dr Mary Ockenden) to complete is Kirsty, who recently defended her thesis on Phosphorus Transfers to Water under Climate Change. Her examiners were Professor Helen Jarvie and Dr Alona Armstrong. Well done Kirsty, happy days. we have to share the results with the world and get them to wake up to the issues.....

Saturday, 18 November 2017

Andy Tweedy has recently started his PhD working between myself and Marc Stutter at the James Hutton Institute and Louise Walker at EMS. Andy has an exciting project studying phosphorus mobility in soils as affected by carbon and nitrogen. He is part of the STARS Soil CDT #starsoil. Welcome Andy I’m confident you will go a long way! Here are some pictures of our recent gathering in Lancaster.

Friday, 17 November 2017

Yesterday I spoke in an Webinair hosted by the North American Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance. A copy of the webinar can be viewed here - thanks to Matt Scholz from the Alliance for sharing. Regards, Phil

Wednesday, 13 September 2017

Today I said goodbye to Deborah Bellaby who has been working on the EdenDTC team with me for 8 years. It's been terrific to work with Deborah and I wish her all the best for her new job. Where did the time go?

Wednesday, 30 August 2017

We have just published in Nature Communications a sobering reminder about the prospects of phosphorus transfer from land to water in the future under climate change. Mary Ockenden, my Post Doctoral research fellow, skillfully led the paper and the abstract of the paper follows, with a link to the open access version of the paper here and a PDF here.

Phosphorus losses from land to water will be impacted by climate change
and land management for food production, with detrimental impacts on
aquatic ecosystems. Here we use a unique combination of methods to
evaluate the impact of projected climate change on future phosphorus
transfers, and to assess what scale of agricultural change would be
needed to mitigate these transfers. We combine novel high-frequency
phosphorus flux data from three representative catchments across the UK,
a new high-spatial resolution climate model, uncertainty estimates from
an ensemble of future climate simulations, two phosphorus transfer
models of contrasting complexity and a simplified representation of the
potential intensification of agriculture based on expert elicitation
from land managers. We show that the effect of climate change on average
winter phosphorus loads (predicted increase up to 30% by 2050s) will be
limited only by large-scale agricultural changes (e.g., 20–80%
reduction in phosphorus inputs).

Wednesday, 9 August 2017

Thanks to Matt Scholtz from the US EPA Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance, here is a video talking head summary of our recent paper on long term in Nature Geosciences. The doi of the paper is doi:10.1038/ngeo2693 and you can click on this for a link. The take home point from this reminds us of the slow speed that P moves through the land water system.

Tuesday, 8 August 2017

Danilo Almeida had spent the last 12 months working with the team in the lab on organic phosphorus mobilisation in soils. Danilo is completing his PhD on the effect of tropical grasses on soil phosphorus availability to soybean, in collaboration with São Paulo State University, Brazil. It's been a pleasure to work with you Danilo. Dan left me a bottle of Cachaca - so it looks like a summer of Caipirinha cocktails!

Soil and Water Blog

Welcome. The objective of this blog is to provide you with a forum to enable the exchange of information and ideas on recent developments in science and policy of soil and water management in the UK, particularly the science of diffuse nutrient pollution from agriculture.